Fighting rages in Gaza as toll nears 1,000

PALESTINE: Israeli forces battled Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip’s main city early Wednesday and bombed the enclave’s southern border with Egypt as the death toll from the war on Hamas neared 1,000.

With the war now in its 19th day, witnesses said there were far fewer air strikes on Gaza City and other parts of the north than on the previous night, but that heavy fighting still continued.

“Tanks are shelling Palestinian fighters, who are responding with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades),” an AFP correspondent said. “There is heavy machine-gun fire on both sides.”

One Palestinian was killed and another 20 wounded when an air strike destroyed a house in the city’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, he quoted medics and witnesses as saying. It was not immediately known why the house was hit.

Speaking on Tuesday, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas had said Israel’s offensive was “becoming more ferocious each day as the number of victims rises.

“Israel is keeping up this aggression to wipe out our people over there,” he added from his base in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli special forces backed by tanks and air strikes had thrust ever deeper into Gaza’s City, advancing hundreds of metres (yards) into several neighbourhoods in the south, witnesses said.

The crump of tank shells and the crackle of gunfire echoed through much of the day.

Palestinian medical sources said around 70 people were killed on Tuesday, taking the overall toll to around 975 Palestinians, with another 4,400 wounded.

Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed in combat or by rocket attacks since December 27, when the Jewish state began its deadliest ever offensive on Gaza, ruled by the Islamist Hamas movement since mid-2007.

Israel also carried out a wave of bombing raids on the border town of Rafah, sending hundreds of people fleeing onto the streets, and those strikes continued into the night.

The military said its warplanes had attacked more than 100 targets since early on Monday morning, including 55 weapons-smuggling tunnels in southern Gaza.

Eighteen rockets and mortar rounds were fired into Israel, an army spokesman said — barely a quarter of the number recorded at the start of the offensive. No casualties were reported.

Israel’s military chief said Operation Cast Lead was making progress but warned that troops faced “complicated” conditions in Gaza City, home to more than half a million people and where Israel has little combat experience.

“We have already achieved a lot against both Hamas’s infrastructure and its military wing but we still have work to be done,” the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, told lawmakers.

Gaza City, Wednesday, AFP